Gore: Bush Threatens Foundation of Democracy

By Mary Curtius

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

1:21 PM PDT, June 24, 2004

WASHINGTON —
Comparing President Bush to Julius Caesar, former Vice President Al Gore warned
today that the president's accumulation of power since the Sept. 11, 2001
terrorist attacks threatened the foundations of American democracy.

In
a hard-hitting speech delivered to an enthusiastic audience at Georgetown
University Law School, Gore accused President Bush of having increased his own
power at the expense of the other branches of government and individual civil
liberties.

The greatest danger to the United States, said the man who
narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to Bush, was posed not by
terrorism, but by the threat that Americans "will acquiesce in the slow and
steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person."

Gore
made his comments as a political firestorm rages over a report from the special
commission investigating the 9/11 attacks and the way the media characterized
that report.

After the commission's staff concluded that the Iraqi
regime had contacts, but not a "collaborative relationship" with Al Qaeda, news
organizations said that finding undercut one of the Bush administration's key
rationales for invading Iraq. Vice President Cheney, in turn, denounced the
media as mischaracterizing the report and the administration's
position.

But in remarks sure to fuel the controversy, Gore accused
Cheney and Bush of deliberately misleading the American public on connections
between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Gore accused them of doing so
"because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that
attacked us, then that means the president took us to war when he didn't have
to."

Gore remained tightly controlled as he delivered his remarks, in
sharp contrast to his demeanor when he attacked the Bush administration's Iraq
policy last month in a speech that brought criticism from Republicans and some
Democrats.

In the earlier speech, Gore seemed to lose control as he
shouted his demand that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Central Intelligence Agency Chief George J.
Tenet and other administration officials resign over what he said were their
"twisted values and atrocious policies" in Iraq. Tenet has subsequently
resigned, citing personal reasons.

Before Gore delivered his remarks
today, the Republican National Committee issued a press release accusing him of
having "anger management" issues. The release cited disapproving commentaries
offered by conservative columnists and other political analysts after Gore made
his remarks in May.

But while Gore kept his voice low and his delivery
measured, the words were no less harsh than those of his earlier
speech.

Noting that "democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed
the Rubicon in violation of the Senate's long prohibition against a returning
general entering the city while still in command of military forces," Gore said
Bush, too, "has gone to war and has come back into 'the city' and declared th
at our nation is now in a permanent state of war."

The president,
Gore said, plays on the fear Americans have of global terrorism to justify what
Gore called "his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his
personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual
citizen."

Gore reserved his most scathing remarks for what he called
the "curious question of why President Bush continues" to claim that there was
"a working cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

If Bush is not
lying, Gore said, "if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in
battle with Al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps (of evidence), then
who would want them in charge?"

Republicans accused Gore of acting as a
surrogate for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic
presidential nominee, in attacking the administration's assertions of links
between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In a written response, Republican
National Committee com munications director Jim Dyke said that "Al Gore's
history of denial of the threat of terrorism is no less dangerous today in his
role as John Kerry's surrogate than it was in the 1990s in his role as vice
president, a time when Osama bin Laden was declaring war on the United States
five different times."

Dyke was repeating an oft-made Republican
criticism that the administration of President Bill Clinton failed to act
aggressively to destroy Al Qaeda, even after Bin Laden declared war on the
United States and launched attacks on U.S. targets abroad.